Guest Post by Morbo
Wal-Mart recently opened a store in Landover Hills, Md. The move was significant because this store is one of the company’s first in the inner suburbs of Washington, D.C. In fact, it’s “inside the Beltway” — the ring road that surrounds the nation’s capital.
This is a densely populated, highly urban area. Wal-Mart, having conquered the small towns and outer suburbs, has only the cities and inner suburbs left. Piercing the Beltway was an important symbolic move.
To placate local officials, Wal-Mart agreed to refrain from selling guns at this store and is running ads for some local businesses on its in-store radio station. Can you feel the love?
I remain skeptical. Every time I read an article about Wal-Mart doing something that sounds good, it seems that only a few days pass before it is revealed that the good thing was merely a PR gimmick.
It’s useful to be reminded just how loathsome Wal-Mart is. A recent article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker about the mega-retailer’s outreach to Democrats contained a series of sobering facts.
* During the past 15 years, more than 75 percent of Wal-Mart’s political donations have gone to Republicans.
* Wal-Mart has a wage cap for its “associates.” No matter how long you work there, you’ll never make more than $18 an hour and most likely you won’t get above $13. I realize that $18 an hour, which is more than $37,000 per year, sounds good in some parts of the country. But very few Wal-Mart clerks are making that much. The company keeps a lot of people on part time status, and union activists say most of them probably don’t crack $10 an hour.
* Wal-Mart executives don’t have to worry about salary caps. Wal-Mart President Lee Scott was paid $15.7 million in total compensation in 2006. He was recently given another bonus: $22 million in stock. In 2005, John Menzer, a Wal-Mart vice president, was paid $6.5 million in salary, bonuses and stock options.
* Wal-Mart once bragged about an affordable health-care plan it was offering employees. Indeed, premiums were as low as $11 a month in some areas of the country. There is one drawback: The plan has a $3,000 deductible. Try meeting that when you make $15,000 per year.
* Wal-Mart has more than one million U.S. employees. Forty-six percent of the children of these employees are on Medicaid or are uninsured.
* Wal-Mart made a big deal out of its decision to sell a number of generic drugs for four dollars per prescription. But many of the drugs are older and less prescribed these days. Most can be produced for far less than four dollars per bottle. Wal-Mart makes a killing on the plan.
* Mona Williams, Wal-Mart’s chief PR flack, told Goldberg, “Wal-Mart is taking care of the people the Democratic Party says it represents – the poor, the middle class. The Democrats are not taking care of them. We’re like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.” She was not joking.
I realize that lots of corporations are money-grubbing and heartless. But Wal-Mart has taken things to new depths and in doing so lowered the bar for others. Remember, this is the company that once closed an entire store in Quebec because workers tried to unionize. I don’t care how cheap the laundry detergent and t-shirts are. Please, please shop somewhere else.